Moving to the Cloud Technology Enablement for Enterprises

Cloud computing is a common practice today and there are many providers who offer cloud enablement solutions and infrastructure as a service (IaaS). While moving to a cloud is an easy decision to take, answering where the physical infrastructure is, how it is accessed etc can help you adopt the best deployment models that'll drive your business forward. Otherwise, it is often confusing to choose from the various options available today.

Lets take a look at the common ones and determine how they are characterised for different infrastructure

Public Cloud

In public clouds, the end users do not own the physical infrastructure and it is hosted at the vendor's premises. Also, although the customer has no visibility, the data center is run and controlled virtually through simple web interface consoles with which he can manage storage and resources.

Public clouds are flexible, elastic and reliable. Their capacity can be increased within minutes and there is quality of service (QoS). The network in the public cloud is not dedicated to any single user, it is a group of pooled resources from which each user chooses what he needs. Each client is given an account in the public cloud, through which they can run their applications as per the requirement.

Hence public clouds are suitable mainly for limited budget enterprises who need quick deployment. They are comparatively fast and a cheaper solution to cloud deployment considering the maintenance of the data center is not something that you will need to worry about.

Private Cloud

A private cloud is setup in the external or internal premises and managed by the organization itself (or a third party by choice) whilst they can setup their own dedicated network. Due to exclusivity and flexibility, this deployment model is considered more secure, private and scalable.

Private clouds are usually used by large enterprises who require large amount of resources for setting up a better platform. To set up private clouds, data centers are bought and virtualization technologies are implemented in them in order to enable an exclusive private virtual space for an enterprise. Highly critical applications which require constant monitoring and special maintenance like firewall, security measures, etc are run on private clouds since they need to be tweaked to meet the specific requirements.

On the basis of hosting they are classified into externally hosted and on-premise clouds. Clouds hosted by a third party provider outside the user's physical premises are called externally hosted clouds, whereas when the cloud is provided to the user inside his company's physical premises, it is an on-premise private cloud.

Hybrid Cloud

Hybrid clouds are set up connecting the in-house infrastructure with the local network, along with advanced firewall protection, load-balancers, etc and have a high rate of security. Every organization experiences a sudden peak in their load and which causes their network to go haywire. This is an occasional condition when there are unexpected rise in demands and needs to be provided with a solution that can be used only when necessary. This is where hybrid clouds prove beneficial.

Hybrid clouds are considered the most secure deployment models, primarily due to their location. They are set up inside the infrastructure, which makes data archival very easy. It basically acts as a cache to the infrastructure, and data can be cached locally and later be trickled up to the cloud provider. In case of an emergency full-system recovery, the saved data just needs to be copied from the local system to the cloud provider, and thus it also handles restores easily. Hybrid clouds take the best features from public and private clouds, tweak them a little higher, and add value to their service. For example, content syndication is a possible option in public clouds, which you cannot use if you implement a private cloud. Similarly, other beneficial features like easier data archival, faster disaster recovery options, QoS optimization and more. The hybrid clouds are secure and scalable and also interoperable. This model is highly advanced yet simplified and reliable.

So which one should you go for?

The decision as to which cloud you should choose depends on what type of business you own and what your requirements are. We have seen the different types, listed their features and their advantages.